Writing and pooping and compliments

Subtitle: In which I spend 2,394 words almost-coherently and sometimes disgustingly writing about writing on a week when I said I wouldn’t be writing.

Alternate subtitle: The two people who manage to read this will probably either really like it or want to vomit.

Writing is a very personal thing to me. Not because I am revealing the inner-Me through my words or something (I’m not; I checked and I’m pretty sure that if I have an inner-Me, it’s not something I’ll want to reveal through blogspot.com), but because of what writing is. If I say to you that you are a good writer, I am not complimenting you on your effective adherence to grammatical conventions or your skillful selection of adjectives – I am saying something much more personal: this isn’t quite it, but the closest analogue would be saying that you are good at thinking.

I want to be good at thinking (≈ writing).

A lot of people make the mistake of viewing writing as something that writers do just like baseball is something that baseball players do. It’s a school of thought that says leave it up to the journalists and the authors to translate experiences into words. They’re the professionals.

But if you understand writing to be roughly the same as thinking then I don’t imagine you’d be comfortable saying leave the thinking up to the professionals.

Writing is a skill, sure, but what I’m trying to say is that it represents a “skill” that is fundamentally who we are, or who we perceive ourselves to be, as conscious creatures. Here’s maybe a better way of saying it: Putting on your resume that you are good at writing is about as absurd as putting that you are good at thinking.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I view writing as some means through which people showcase their inner experience in all its pristine beauty. I am a fan of crude analogies, and I am about to release a really crude one all over your ass: Writing is like digesting the world and then pooping it out on the floor so that others can smell it. Point being that writing is shit-like because words are blunt, smelly instruments that are far more likely to insult than to communicate what it is that is transpiring in your body.

In short: Words are the waste products of our experiences.

Writing is also like pooping in that, although it often feels pleasant, it is not something I do because it is pleasant. Writing, like pooping, is an urge that I ignore at my own peril.

For me, I really do feel the need to write rather like I feel the need to poo. It is a process of psychospiritual digestion (or something)¹ that wouldn’t feel complete unless I dumped it out in a smelly pile of words. And when the urge comes, it’s often hard to resist. I sometimes find myself writing at odd times, either in the middle of the day when I have “better” things to do or late at night when a thought wouldn’t let me sleep. But by and large, I stay pretty regular, doing most of my word excretion after my evening nap and then again right before I go to bed. I’m sure you wanted to know that.

For me it’s writing. For you it may be talking. Or maybe for you verbal excretion is completely unnecessary. That seems unlikely. I imagine it is a pretty basic human thing that whenever we have an experience that is either especially intense or especially frequent, your urge is to excrete words, ideally to someone who will be able to not only tolerate the stench, but to understand what the stench says about what was going on in your body such that they can feel something like what you were feeling, or at least seem to get it. Basically what I’m saying is that we want other people to ingest our poop. Usually our loved ones. Which is weird.

I don’t think I had my first good writepoop until I was 23. Before then, I did a little psychospiritual digestion, mostly through talking with friends, but in hindsight it seems like the first 23 years of my life were rather a lot like being perpetually constipated. And I don’t think it’s until relatively recently – like the past 5 months ish – that I really recognized the virtues of a big fat dump.

Take, for instance, The Look Back. I published this quote a long time ago in a post about bathroom behavior, but reading this again and replacing “poop” with “writing,” it seems so perfect:

Your poop is over. If you're not standing already, physiology dictates that you now do so. Society dictates that you flush. But for many, psychology intercedes, encouraging a look back.

Some look at their poop for signs of colonic dysfunction. Others look out of guilty curiosity, to see what horror their body has wrought. But for many, perhaps even most, the look is to take pride in their creation. In the afterglow of a successful movement, these proud poopers turn and face their demon -- once their tormentor, now their vanquished foe. If it's abnormally big, they feel pride; if it's unusually small, they feel disappointment; if it's terribly messy, they feel artistic. Whatever the case, seeing the poop is closure. The struggle has ended.

It seems contradictory that waste should engender pride. While it poses no threat to the person who created it, and thus should not be viewed negatively, why view it positively? Why should one not view it as a neutral fact of life, no more worthy of comment than breathing?

The simplest explanation of why people like to look at poop stems from the first duality of poop: the more it hurt to hold it in, the better it feels to let it out. To those for whom this feeling is positive, it's only natural to learn to associate the sight of poop with the euphoria.

Logically, I cannot possibly be proud of my writing in an absolute sense because my words are inevitably and always a very smelly approximation of what’s going on inside me. I can only be proud in a relative sense. I can look around and say, hey, my poop isn’t quite as ugly and smelly as other people’s². Or I can say, hey I’m pretty normal and healthy.

When you understand writing to be poopy, there’s less to be self-conscious about. The only thing that separates me from the DFWs and the Kafkas and the whomevers of the literary world is that they have developed the ability to make their excretions a bit more presentable by introducing a touch of added symmetry or coherence or color or what-have-you.

That’s not true, of course. There are reasons beyond workshop techniques that DFW’s wordpoop is infinitely more compelling than mine. This guy was digesting the world on a level that was so “whole other” that it’s not even visible from the plane I’m pooping on. Right now I’m reading a collection of his non-fiction in the book “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again³,” and in my nerdy spreadsheet I rated his writing one-tenth of a point less than perfect, a 9.9, because in some places he’s just showing off. I’m not going to say that DFW had such digestive power that he managed to poop flawless golden foil-wrapped nuggets with little ribbons on top – they are still just words; and he was wrong a lot of the time; he makes a lot of pretty basic errors of economic logic, for example – I’m just saying that this is where the analogy fails, because the difference between great writing and merely good writing goes beyond mere presentation.

What makes DFW’s writing great (to those who perceive his writing as great) relates to what I am going to call the DFW Theory of Aesthetics, which says that art is only interesting to the extent that it rings psychic cherries in the communicatee, i.e., the extent to which it feels true. And hoo boy does his writing ring my psychic cherries. It feels like there is an intellectual orgasm to be had in almost every paragraph.

Again, this is not the same as saying that DFW’s writing is an accurate representation of reality, or something. I think he was wrong a lot of the time. When people talk about DFW’s writing, they almost always talk about his amazing prose, but I think that’s exactly wrong. What he did so jaw-droppingly well was not presentation but something like digest the parts of the world that I was only subconsciously aware even existed. It’s like he had discovered some exotic new form of nutrition that I could not consciously access but could kind of peek at through his waste products. (Har har.)

And so maybe by now you’re seeing why writing is so personal to me, so you can sort of understand what I’m about to tell you, which is that when I get any kind of external feedback on my writing, I listen pretty (ridiculously) carefully.

The reviews have been mixed. And in fact the reason why I started writing this epic post is because I feel that I am suffering from a pretty severe case of Contradictory or Nebulous Feedback Syndrome.

99% of the comments about my writing seem to fall into one of two buckets:

1. You’re awesome.
2. I don’t get it.⁴

There are a few people who have actually combined the two, saying they don’t get it but they can tell I’m a good writer. Um, what? No, that makes absolutely no sense. I cannot possibly be simultaneously good and un-gotten.

I recognize that my style is not exactly the easiest to interpret. While I am careful to avoid unnecessarily big words, I have a pesky tendency to be rather abstract. To complicate matters, I have the meandering incoherence of a small child. (Adorably so.) I am also unabashedly hint-y, making regular references that you might not get unless you’ve been reading other posts carefully. To complicate matters further, I am often only half-serious or less.

From what I gather, people want the stuff they read to be either perfectly sincere or perfectly insincere. Mixing the two just ain’t couth. People want blogs to be about opinions⁵, either directly expressed or indirectly expressed through mockery. I don’t blame them: If I can’t tell what a writer is intending, I am going to be uncomfortable.

Here’s the thing: I, the writer, rarely know what I’m intending! In a sense, the half-seriousness is often sincere, because I often really don’t have an opinion on what I’m saying. But if you ask me, that’s the most interesting kind of writing.

Sorry to circle back around to this, but please keep in mind that I am taking a metaphorical dump right now. (And you are staring at a metaphorical turd.) I don’t know what’s going to come out. The end result could be remarkably satisfying or bitterly unsatisfying for me, and god knows what it will be for you. I can (and do) try to whip it up into something a bit more presentable, but no amount of sprucing up is going to hide the fact that the medium I am dealing in is feces.

Some of the feedback in the “you’re awesome” category has been intensely flattering. A number of people have told me this blog is their favorite, and I believe a handful of them. And similarly for suggestions that I write a book. One guy whose writing I happen to really admire sent me an email with very specific feedback w/r/t to being the most starred blog in his Google Reader, saying that the entertainment value exceeds that of his favorite TV show, and also seemingly sincerely suggesting that I apply to be a writer for SNL.

What’s more gratifying than the specifics of the compliments is the feeling of being gotten. No words.

But let’s be realistic: This blog is very, very cultish. It has a readership approximately the size of a college auditorium⁶. On the one hand, it really pads my ego to think about that because only a few of those readers knew me pre-blog. I.e., hundreds of the people are reading not out of some subtle social obligation to pretend that they like me but because they genuinely find it worth reading.

On the other hand, I can easily look at the same number as an indictment on my awesomeness. I mean consider that there are about as many people in Raleigh paying thousands of dollars and 45 hours of their life to take one section of an Organic Chem class as there are people in the world who want to spend a few minutes to ingest the most important/interesting things I’ve been thinking about, for free.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m modest. I’m not. I believe that if you leave me alone in a room with a keyboard that has a serviceable backspace key, I can be pretty smart and funny – like 92^nd percentile smart⁷ and 83^rd percentile funny. And I believe I’ve become a heck of a lot smarter and funnier in the 3 years since overcoming constipation⁸. And I think I’m improving at a faster, rather than a slower, rate.

This post, I’m aware, has narcissism bleeding out the ears. That makes me a little itchy, but it also feels honest. I’m ringing my own psychic cherries, or something.

If there is a point to this post¹¹, it is probably that we humans seem to need to digest experiences, the end result of which is verbal waste products, making things like writing and conversation no ordinary “skills” to be left to professionals, and that probably one of our¹² strongest desires is simply to have people smell our poop and kind of like it.

I.e., I’m fragile, so be nice to me.

---

¹(“or something” is my way of indicating that words suck.)

²(I take the relative not-unpleasantness of my writepoop to mean that there’s something magical about me.)

³(The footnotes in this post are in his honor.)

⁴(“Over my head” is the phrase typically used.)

⁵(aren’t there enough of those?)

⁶(200-250 regulars)

⁷(this despite my use of the word "smart")

⁸(If you don’t believe me, check the archives.)<sup>9

9</sup>(Wait, no, please don’t.)<sup>10

10</sup>(This is just so I could say I put a footnote on a footnote on a footnote.)

¹¹(there’s not)

¹²(my)

If you have a blog and I read it, watch out. I’m coming for you.

This week, I’ve decided, I am going to do most of my writing not on this blog but on other people’s blogs. Well, in the comments section of other people’s blogs. I feel that I need a break from masturbatorily tossing half-formed ideas into the abyss, and instead having something specific to comment on.

My goal is to leave the best comment I can possibly leave, which to me means identifying the main point and either dismantling it, adding to it, making you look at it from a different angle, or ideally some combination of the three, and doing so gently enough that you won’t hate me.

If there’s something in particular I can offer the service of my brilliance on, then just toss a link either below this post or in an email.

Maybe I’ll do a summary/wrap-up post at the end of the week, or maybe I’ll enjoy this so much that you’ll never hear from me again. (Doubtful.)

This feels true

The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as communication and art that doesn’t is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person masturbate.

This is one of those analogies that I am never going to forget. It’s from David Foster Wallace’s “David Lynch Keeps His Head.”

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet had a huge influence on him, and here he explains why:

Blue Velvet captured something crucial about the way the U.S. present acted upon our nerve endings, something crucial that couldn’t be analyzed or reduced to a system of codes or aesthetic principles or workshop techniques.

The movie helped me realize that first-rate experimentalism is a way not to “transcend” or “rebel against” the truth but actually to honor it. It brought home that the very most important artistic communications take place at a level that not only isn’t intellectual but isn’t even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s true medium isn’t verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images are Realistic or Postmodern or Expressionistic or Surreal or what-the-hell-ever is less important than whether they feel true, whether they ring psychic cherries in the communicatee.

And art, DFW says, is only interesting to the extent it can do that.

Understand women at your own risk

Someone asked why I’ve been trying so hard to understand women, and I didn’t really have a good answer.

One possible response might go something like this: I start with the general in order to understand the particular. I want to understand women in general so that I can hopefully come to understand – and thereby love – one woman in particular.

Er, not really.

It’s true that the ultimate goal (I think) is something like to have a partner whom I love and who loves me in return, whom I can be vulnerable with and who can be vulnerable with me. You know, a fellow vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe with whom I can go through life a little less alone.

But to understand her? No, not really.

Let’s think about this: What does understanding mean? To say that you understand economic systems or particle physics or a woman is to say that, given certain events, you can predict how economic systems/particles/the woman will respond. In short: understandable means predictable.

When I think of the qualities that make someone attractive or loveable, predictable ain’t one of ‘em. Granted, to some degree predictable is cute. I know that if my mom sneezes once, there are three more on the way. I know that as soon as Khan hears the sound of me picking up his leash, he is going to hide behind the couch. These things are adorable.

But to say that you understand (= can predict) someone’s little tics isn’t saying much at all.

To say that I truly understand someone – their values, their fears, what makes them chuckle, how they will respond when things get seriously difficult, etc. – seems to me more than a bit conceited. I’d not only need some level of omniscience, I’d also need to believe that life and people are more coherent than they really are.

Lots of people seem to think that understanding someone is a necessary condition to loving them. I’m not seeing it. I’d say that love and understanding are perfectly uncorrelated, or maybe even slightly negatively correlated. I’ll get to that in a moment.

The best definition I’ve heard for romantic love is intimacy + passion + commitment. To put it considerably more crudely, to be in a loving relationship means that you’ve got to share private details, have a desire to bump genitals, and have a spoken or unspoken contract with each other to continue sharing private details and bumping genitals. Notice two things that are conspicuously absent: (1) you don’t need warm, fuzzy feelings, and (2) you don’t need to understand them.

Understanding someone might even be detrimental to a loving relationship. The passion element of the romantic love equation relates to the metaphorical sideboob theory, which says that what makes something or someone alluring or seductive or attractive is that you don’t get to see the full boob, and in particular you don’t get to see the nipple, but you do get to see a part that still feels private or unique or special. In other words, you get private information but it’s not exactly what you want or expect. Implication: too much predictability (= understanding) is a total turnoff.

On the other hand, while coming to understand someone might not be the best for your libido, it probably helps you to effectively inhabit the same living room. Trade offs.

Back to the original question: Why would I want to understand women in general or a woman in particular? Friendly reminder: I don’t know why I do anything. But I’m happy to pull an explanation out of my buttocks:

Because it’s fun.

Condescending horsetwaddle

Warning: If you are uncomfortable with meandering, loosely-related thoughts, then you should stop reading now. Then again, if that’s the case, why did you ever start reading this blog?

Movies, books, music, blogs, TV, and even video games are authoritarian media, and that’s part of their magic as David Foster Wallace explained in “David Lynch Keeps His Head”:

They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is surrendering to it, letting it dominate you. The sitting in the dark, the looking up, the tranced distance from the screen, the being able to see the people on the screen without being seen by the people on the screen, the people on the screen being so much bigger than you, prettier than you, more compelling than you, etc.

But different movies/books/music/blogs/TV/video games have different intentions. And seeing how I, like the average American, spend about 76 days per year consuming this stuff, I’d kind of like to know what the stuff I’m consuming wants from me (which is kind of inseparable from asking what I want from it), and how exactly it is affecting me.

I think we need a taxonomy. The simplest possible division would be high-brow/low-brow or arthouse/commercial. Here’s DFW again:

Art film is essentially teleological: it tries in various ways to “wake the audience up” or render us more “conscious.” (This kind of agenda can easily degenerate into pretentiousness and self-righteousness and condescending horsetwaddle, but the agenda itself is large-hearted and fine.)

Commercial film doesn’t seem like it cares very much about an audience’s instruction or enlightenment. Commercial film’s goal is to “entertain,” which usually means enabling various fantasies that allow the moviegoer to pretend he’s somebody else and that life is somehow bigger and more coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just more entertaining than a moviegoer’s life really is. You could say that a commercial movie doesn’t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it – the seduction, a fantasy-for-money transaction, is a commercial movie’s basic point.

An art film’s point is usually more intellectual or aesthetic, and you usually have to do some interpretive work to get it, so that when you pay to see an art film you’re actually paying to do work (whereas the only work you have to do with most commercial films is whatever work you did to afford the price of the ticket).

OK, so at the broadest level maybe we can say that certain media are just trying to entertain us (which DFW brilliantly defines as “enabling fantasies”), while others aren’t so much. The best analogy I’ve heard (also from DFW) for this type of fantasy-enabling media is candy: It’s more pleasurable and easier than real food but it also doesn’t have any of the nourishment of real food, which is all right in low doses but problematic if it is the basic main staple of your diet. (See: Virtual Reality Pornography.)

On the other hand, the point I was trying to get at in this post is that the commercial stuff, from a bit of a detached perspective, can be just as beautiful and profound as the stuff that is oozing with intended depth and meaning (“nourishment”). I’ve been listening to commercial radio for weeks now, and I’m prepared to offer evidence:

Usher: Dance like it’s the last night of your life.

Britney: Keep on dancing till the world ends.

Rihanna: Life's too short to be sittin' round miserable.

Pitbull: Give me everything tonight. For all we know, we might not get tomorrow.

In other words, you’ll be dead soon, so hit the club, drink up, find a cutie, dance the night away, and then go have lots of sloppy sex. Anything else would be kind of ridiculous, all-considering.

To a 12 year old, these might seem like profound insights, but to anyone who has checked an actuarial table for death probabilities, they seem a little silly, or shortsighted at least. What’s profound is not the message in the hit music but the fact that this message – what I will call the Hit Music Philosophy of Life – has such mass resonance.

Upon discovering this, I considered, briefly, becoming a DJ for a hit music station. I feel that the kids need a philosophical chaperone. They need to hear about time horizons and actuarial tables and compounding interest and historical investment returns.

“Up next is a song from Usher espousing the values of hedonism. Before I play this, I just want to warn you, kiddos, that, statistically-speaking, you have at least 40 years left.”

But then I realized that the Hit Music Philosophy of Life seems to be serving a very particular purpose, and not so much to guide the day-to-day activities of 12 year olds like I feared. Not just the lyrics but the soul of the music – a lot of it, at least – really seems based in a kind of flirtatious awareness of the fact that we will one day die. It approaches it very indirectly and probably unintentionally but I hear it essentially saying that life is scary, unpredictable, and inevitably finite – conclusion: better get some sloppy sex in while we still have a chance. In other words, it is a version of the same stuff that DFW is always trying to tell us, just replaced with a characteristically adolescent conclusion. (I’m aware of how pretentious that sounds, and I’m okay with it.)

I highly doubt that 99% of the hit music artists or 99% the hit music listeners are actually looking for any kind of existential depth, but that’s precisely the point! Despite their lack of intention, it’s still there in plain sight, like a child sitting carelessly on a casket. This creeps me out in a very David Lynchian way, which I will get to in a moment.

If I may get even snootier, I would say that even seemingly very “adult” media like the evening news or public radio or political blogs very often fall squarely into the entertainment (fantasy enabling) bucket. We easily rationalize our consumption of them by saying that we are informing ourselves so that we can make important, rational decisions with our votes, or something. But let’s be serious: How often have you walked away from these media feeling intellectually challenged or that you’ve learned anything other than the latest gossip? Here is that DFW quote again, with “the evening news” replacing “commercial film”:

The evening news’s goal is to “entertain,” which usually means enabling various fantasies that allow the audience to pretend that life is somehow bigger and more coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just more entertaining than it really is.

I’d add, again, that, just like with hit music, there is something profound not in the evening news’s intention but in its mass resonance.

Back to the taxonomy. We are still dealing in very broad strokes, but here is DFW describing David Lynch’s category, which doesn’t seem to fall neatly into either commercial or arthouse:

David Lynch’s movies are often described as occupying a kind of middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what they really occupy is a whole third different kind of territory. Most of Lynch’s best films don’t really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretive process by which movies’ (certainly avant-garde movies’) central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get when he says that Lynch’s movies are “to be experienced rather than explained.” Lynch’s movies are indeed susceptible to a variety of sophisticated interpretations, but it would be a serious mistake to conclude from this that his movies’ point is “film interpretation is necessarily multivalent” or something – they’re just not that kind of movie.

Nor are they seductive, though, at least in the commercial senses of being comfortable or linear or High-Concept or “feel-good.” You almost never in a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to “entertain” you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: you don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standing unspoken/unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies.

This may, in fact, be Lynch’s true and only agenda: just to get inside your head. He sure seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he’s in there. Is this “good” art? It’s hard to say. It seems – once again – either ingenious or psychopathic.

So now we have three broad categories: Entertain (candy-like pleasure), Enlighten (“nourishment”), and Just Nihilistically Get In Your Head (david lynch).

These do not have to be mutually exclusive categories, of course, and in fact I tend to think that the most compelling media are at the intersection of the three categories. To make the food analogy even lamer, the most compelling media are kind of like a nice pumpkin soufflé (nourishment) with whipped cream on top (candy) and spiked with an intoxicating substance (surrealism). I can’t think of many good examples of this, but one stands out clearly: Werner Herzog. His documentaries/movies make me laugh for 10 minutes and then think for 10 days, and he always tosses in these amazing surrealist scenes, such as zooming in on an iguana’s head and playing weird industrial music that in some mysterious way… I won’t say it quite “makes sense,” but the film would be sorely lacking without it.

In conclusion: I am in love with Werner Herzog. Sorry that I needed 1,634 words to say that.

I am grateful for stupidly rigid people

We economists aren’t particularly fond of cognitive biases. When behavioral economists/psychologists like Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahneman shove them in our faces, we get a little irritable, because they kind of eff up our theories.

But on this holiday I would like to say that I am immensely grateful for one particular cognitive bias: The one where people tend not to change an established behavior unless the incentive is compelling. This is commonly referred to as the status quo bias.

Why would I be grateful for the status quo bias? Good question. The answer is that if the bias did not exist then there would be no value in odd, unorthodox theories about how the world could be improved, otherwise known as “optimism.” If people were not irrationally rigid in their ways then there would be little use for entrepreneurs or creative types more generally.

Maybe an example would help. Here’s Michael Lewis (hat tip: Andy McKenzie):

Outside of baseball there had been, for decades, an intellectual revolt, led by a free thinker named Bill James, devoted to creating new baseball knowledge. The movement generated information of value in the market for baseball players, but the information went ignored by baseball insiders. The market’s willful ignorance had a self-reinforcing quality: the longer the information was ignored, the less credible it became. After all, if this stuff had any value, why didn’t baseball insiders pay it any attention? To see the value in what Bill James and his crowd were up to you had first to believe that a market as open and transparent as the market for baseball players could ignore valuable information—that is, that it could be irrational.

I have an example of my own. I have decided that if I go back for grad school (which would likely be either Duke or NC State), I am going to try out for the basketball team and legitimately expect to not only make the team but to contribute in a meaningful way. This despite not having played competitively since middle school.

Before you start questioning my sanity, let me say that I am fully aware that compared to even the average Division II walk-on, I am a laughably bad basketball player in almost every way. I’d have no hope of staying in front of anyone on defense, I could hardly be expected to grab a rebound even if it came right to me, and my vertical leap and release point are such that 92% of my shots would get blocked right into my grill.

But here’s the thing: I wouldn’t try out for the team as a “regular” basketball player. That’s not my comparative advantage. I’d try out for a specialist role that for some mysterious reason most basketball teams don’t think they need (status quo bias).

Although I didn’t play much competitive basketball, I used to shoot free throws as a tot for hours at a time late into the night. I am currently an 88-90% free-throw shooter, and I am confident that if I trained regularly and intensively that I could get in the 95-97% range. In other words, I could easily be the best free-throw shooter on either Duke or NC State.

Yeah but so could a lot of people. The challenge would be not so much proving that I can make free throws but convincing the coaches that they need me. I think I can do that. See if you buy my argument:

Coach,

It’s obvious that having a free-throw specialist would help the team immensely. The difference between having a 75% and a 95% free-throw shooter at the line at the end of a close game is 2-5 losses per year, which is potentially the difference between an 8 seed and a 1 seed. Practically speaking, the difference in TV, ticket, and merchandise revenue is many millions of dollars.

It’s also obvious that being able to make a free throw is useless unless you can:

(1) get open to receive the pass.
(2) handle the ball well enough to not have it stolen from you.
(3) brush off the pressure of 28,000 screaming fans.

My proposal is this: Let me join the team and I will train just as intensively as the rest of the team but only on those 3 skills (plus free-throw shooting, of course). Justin Wehr would be to [Duke/NC State] as Mariano Rivera is to the Yankees: the old reliable man you call in whenever you need to finish a game.

What do you have to lose? A roster spot? Come on, be serious. You have 15 of those, and you’ll use maybe 9. I am white and I am local and kinda cute in a goofy way, which means fans would adore me. Plus, I’m 26, which means I’m infinitely more mature than even your seniors. And I have 4 years of eligibility. And I understand the importance of loving gropes.

If I don’t prove my worth by the end of the first year, then you can have my scholarship back.

Think it would work? I’m willing to give it a try.

The broader point is that fantasizing about these sorts of scenarios wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t believe that (a) people are stupidly rigid in their ways, and (b) with a compelling enough incentive, they will change.

“Just take care of yourself”

Being attractive is “easy”:

By far, the most attractive features fell under the category of "self care." These features were changeable aspects like good grooming, neat hair, nice fitting and quality clothing, good posture, and healthy weight. Essentially, the most attractive features about a person (male or female) is that they put forth some effort to shower, groom, select some nice clothes, stand up straight, and manage their diet a bit. No plastic surgery, major gym time, or extensive overhauling required.

That comes from a somewhat irritating article from the self-proclaimed Attraction Doctor (which I found from a Lifehacker article which was sent to me by my ex presumably because she knows I suck at life).

I find the article irritating in part because it’s how-to-y but mostly because it keeps trying to make the point that being attractive is “easy.”

I think we might be interpreting the data differently. The Attraction Doctor is looking at it and thinking, “Sweet, I don’t need my abdominal muscles to pop out of my skin nor do I need to have exotic features, a Latin accent, or a basketball player’s height.” I’m looking at the same data and thinking, “Oh shit, am I going to have to start ironing my socks?”

Attention to detail, fellas. That’s what it’s probably all about. When I think of the guys I have known who get flocked by females (ahem, Lars), these are the types of guys who iron their socks. I never witnessed Lars shop for clothing, but rumor has it that he treats the experience rather like a very complicated surgery. His clothing not only needs to fit in all the right areas, it also needs to complement his eyeballs, or something.

This does not sound easy to me. This sounds like highly skilled and highly time-consuming work. Maybe I should hire someone. The job description would include dressing me, yelling at me to sit up, and pointing to places in my hair or teeth to say, “hey, you missed a spot.”

Wait a minute, that sounds a lot like my ex-girlfriend. Well, shit.

What the Attraction Doctor didn’t tell you but I will is that a much easier and equally reliable way of attracting women is by posting photos of puppies in baskets.



Happy Thanksgiving, folks.

I know stuff you don't

If you are fascinated by the same stuff as I am and/or you just want to know what I'm reading in a creepy stalker-ish way, then boy have I got a deal for you.

I just started a tumblr that posts stuff directly from my starred items in Google Reader. It's a heroically lazy (≈ efficient) way of showing how smart and cultured I am.

It's called I know stuff you don't.

***

Geek note:

I am using a site called If This, Then That to pull this off. I heard about it from Oliver Burkeman, who described it this way:

Recently, I've become preoccupied with the website If This, Then That (ifttt.com, supposedly pronounced "ifttt"), which is either a remarkably handy new tool or a portent of the end of humanity.

The insight behind it is that much of what we want to do online follows predictable sequences, where one event triggers another; Ifttt acts as "digital duct tape" for joining together these events. If that leaves you as baffled as I was when I first heard it, some examples may help. You could use Ifttt to send yourself a text in the morning – "Remember your umbrella!" – if, say, a weather website forecasts rain that day. You could have it post every photo you upload to Flickr to Facebook. Or email your stockbroker – for the purposes of this example, I'm pretending I have a stockbroker – if a share falls below a certain value. Other services exist to perform individual tasks like this, but Ifttt aspires to duct-tape the whole web. It's brilliant yet unsettling, evoking visions of the day when our online lives might run themselves without outside intervention, so that digital me could browse online, forward items of interest to friends, manage my money and answer emails while I dozed in a hammock. From there, it's surely only a short hop to digital me achieving independent consciousness and plotting my destruction. You mock, but I heard two latest-generation iPhones discussing such a scenario between themselves just the other day.

Lady brains

Maybe this is old news to everyone else, but the differences between male and female brains came as a huge surprise to me when I read about them in Hannah Holmes’s The Well-Dressed Ape. We are not talking minor differences here. It’s almost like we have different brains just like we have different genitals:

The brain in my skull is quite a different organ than the one in my mate’s head. In fact, as I investigate this, I’m increasingly convinced that the human animal has two brains, each built, wired, and operated according to its sex.

For starters, males have ~15% bigger brains. But females have more neurons:

Some women even have as many as 12 percent more neurons than men do. Those neurons are most densely crowded on certain layers of the cortex, namely the ones responsible for signals coming in and out of the brain. This may be one reason why women tend to score higher on tests that involve language and communication, and these differences are probably present from birth.

Females have 9x more white matter; males have 6x more gray matter(!):

In those regions of the brain that support “general intelligence,” females have nine times more white matter than males. That’s nine times more of the stuff that ferries data around the brain. As for gray matter related to general intelligence, males have six times more of the data-gathering stuff. These are huge disparities.

“Smarts” are concentrated in different parts of the brain:

The bulk of the human animal’s IQ is based in a handful of areas that govern memory, attention, and language, and there are disparities in where males and females store these crucial brain segments: Females hold “smart matters,” both gray and white, largely in the frontal lobes, where emotions, speech, reasoning, judgment, and movement dwell. Males, by contrast, strew their wits all over the brain. He has crucial patches of gray matter in his frontal lobes and nearby parietal lobes, where reading and math reside. His “smart” white matter resides in a completely different nation, the temporal lobes, home of sound perception and memory processing.

For context, while many other mammal brains show a girl-brain/boy-brain dichotomy, the human differences are much more extreme and puzzling:

Granted, some degree of divergence should be expected. For instance, many mammal brains contain a “sexually dimorphic nucleus,” a buried clump of cells that’s much bigger in the male brain than in the female brain. (Its function is unknown.) Many also host a sex-specific clump that dictates breeding behavior, as do my brain and my mate’s. But what’s so puzzling about the human head is that the sex differences spill into regions of the brain that have nothing to do with sex-specific tasks—the parts governing speech, reasoning, and movement. The human brains are different in the sophisticated areas, where highfalutin thoughts are constructed. Why should that be? Why isn’t the same thinking gear good enough for both sexes?

The kicker is that these huge differences in brain structure matter almost nilch:

Very little of the human behavioral repertoire can be traced to sex differences in the brain. And that’s weird. How can two brains be so different in their layout yet produce such similar behavior? How can we be wired so differently—yet both build bookshelves and write thank-you notes? With brains this different, I’m impressed that we can communicate at all, let alone agree what color to paint the den.

Search terms

One of the joys of blogging is seeing the search terms that people used to find your blog. For some reason it took me almost 3 years to cash in on that joy. Here are some that made me smile:

justin wehr, existential philosopher
boob metaphors
steve jobs sperm
should i tuck sweatshirt into my pants
sad puppy in basket
justin wehr and dr ruth
women bad gifts rational defense
why do men blow dry their balls
when you're poopin' the whole world poops with you
justin wehr, genius or idiot?

How to embarrass future generations

I’ve been taking notes on embarrassing things that I am going to coerce my future family into doing when I am Patriarch Justin.

One of them is, of course, embarrassing family photos. These will include striped sweaters, awkward poses, and possibly even pointing at the camera. These will be done yearly, compiled in a series, and posted on the web like this.

Another is an annual dance party at which I will not dance, but will look on with a smile. Certain songs will be carefully selected to be either hard to dance to or awkwardly sexual.

At the Wehr family table, nobody will be allowed leave the dinner table until they name the most important thing they learned today and/or provide a reasonable nihilistic explanation for the meaninglessness of the word “important.”

In the Wehr family bathroom, a spreadsheet will be taped to the wall recording the size, shape, consistency, and buoyancy of Wehr family waste products.

Ok, I probably won’t be quite that cruel, but I am shooting to be just eccentric and embarrassing enough that they will never be under the illusion that “normalcy” is or ever was part of their existence.

The latest idea was inspired by a Polish tradition called silva rerum which is basically a multi-generational commonplace book that contains anything their authors wished to record for future generations, things like diary-type entires on current events, memoirs, letters, gossips, jokes, philosophical musings, poems, genealogical trees, and advice (agricultural, medical, or moral).

Why is this a Polish family tradition? It seems like it should be an everyone family tradition. I’d love to see what my ancestors wanted me to know. And even more so, I’d love to unload existential musings all over my descendants’ asses.

This opens so many possibilities for me. I thought I might only get to embarrass my kids and maybe grandkids, but now there is no limit to the number of generations I can pester. I can imagine little Johnny opening up the Wehr family commonplace book in the year 2311, flipping to page 58,459, and reading an entry from me saying something like, “And really we’re all just a bunch of hairless apes struggling through life seemingly searching for love, meaning, or something grander when in fact we’re ruled by these tiny effing nucleic acids who just want to make sure their patterns persist for another generation or two.”

Succeeding at not understanding females

Research says that males are dumb:

"There's been a lot of academic research suggesting that men think they know what they're doing, even when they really don't know what they're doing," John Ameriks, the author of the Vanguard study, told the New York Times.

Whoa, wait. So women think they know what they’re doing, and they’re right? It doesn’t seem humanly possible to me that people know what they’re doing, but maybe that’s because I’m a dude. It would be a frightening realization to learn that half of the species knows what they’re doing.

The title of the article is “Why women are better at everything.” (Hat tip: The Door.) Briefly mentioned in the article is a recent book by Dan Abrams called Man Down: Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else.

I have no problem with the statement that women, on average, are better than men at just about everything. That seems right to me. They seem to have the biggest advantage (on average) in the things that matter the most to professional and personal success. Things like social intelligence, empathy, and linguistic prowess. And they seem better at staying out of trouble by avoiding bad habits and heat-of-the-moment escapades.

If we’re not careful, we could deduce that the proper role for males in society is something like that of the housepet. They are best confined to the house so they can protect the fort and stay out of trouble and provide affection and/or sperm cells when needed.

There is some faulty economic logic in that idea, but the biggest problem is failing to account for a certain kind of male that deserves special consideration, and that is the youngish male who is struggling to understand females. This is quite possibly the single most influential animal on the planet: Probably 93% of the great products and culture you consume were the result of this creature scratching around to try to figure out females, so you don’t want to keep these dudes confined to the house. But you also want to be careful about where you let them go because probably most of the wars, rapes, and murders are the responsibility of the same demographic.

My proposal: ankle bracelets. These would come equipped with GPS and actigraphy capabilities, and would be monitored by trained females for warning signs. Every male between the ages of 14 and 42 would be required to wear the ankle bracelet if they scored unsatisfactorily on an annual test assessing their comprehension of females. The test would include questions like,

Which of the following is a female most likely to find ‘sweet’?:

(a) a compliment about her hair
(b) random gifts of beheaded plants or shiny metals
(c) putting the toilet seat down and gently warning her to ‘give it a minute’
(d) coming home to find you wearing nothing but her lingerie

The fellas who answer “(d)” deserve not only our concern but also our support. We need to stop viewing their cluelessness as a fault and instead as an asset. The greatest human creations are typically not the result of genius but of clueless fellas trying with all their might to understand creatures with vaginas. It is our moral responsibility, then, to make sure that we keep them out of trouble while at the same time providing them with the resources needed to make “genius” happen.

Either that or just let females run the place.

Primates in Concourse A

Last night I got the chance to run through an airport. It was my first time, which is sad since an airport is the one place where it’s okay for adults in regular clothing to have two feet off the ground.

I checked my bag with 17 minutes remaining and a security line, two terminals, and 18 gates to get through, plus an unknown number of slowpoke fatties that would inevitably clog the junk. I gave myself a 4% chance.

The security line was unusually short, and I cleared it in something like 8 minutes and then finished getting re-dressed on a train that had fortuitously just arrived. Now it was looking more like 24%. The big remaining unknowns were leg strength, endurance, fatty density, and gate position.

Gate position: bad news. The gate was on the farthest possible end of the concourse, a good 400-yard dash away. Leg strength: Also bad news. I looked down and remembered that I have chicken legs. Endurance: Ugh. Maybe I shouldn’t have had so much “comfort food” for lunch. Fatty density: They were everywhere. Estimated probability: 1.5%.

I booked it. This was not one of those graceful businessman jogs. There were so many extremities flailing that a TSA agent probably would’ve tackled me if he could catch up with me.

People notice when you run like that. Not the fatties in front of you, who seem to enjoy the role of obstacle, but other people. Children cling to their mother’s thigh and look up in horror. People hold $11 beers at their lips but don’t sip. Smartphones are temporarily looked up from.

Back on the Savannah, if people running in this manner didn’t get your attention, then you were apt to become some large mammal’s afternoon snack, so it makes sense that a primate moving in such a desperate manner would attract other primates’ attention.

Anyway, I enjoyed the silent cheering party, the attention whore I am. Even the obstacles were fun in a kind of obnoxious way.

I arrived at the gate sweaty, out of breath, and exhilarated. I got up to the ticket lady, handed her my boarding pass, and said proudly, “there’s one more coming behind me.” It was my colleague, who I left in the dust from the train. The ticket lady was weirdly silent, and I realized why after I confiscated my window seat from some guy who thought he’d gotten lucky. (Instead, the poor guy got to sit next to a sweaty mofo who hogs armrests.)

I realized after I sat down that I was 10 minutes early. I thought for a moment that the running hadn’t been necessary, but then I corrected myself: No, I totally needed to run. Not because I would’ve been late if I hadn’t, but because that was awesome. Next time, I promised myself, I am going to get to the airport an hour earlier and I am going to pack a convenient stick of deodorant, because I am going to run equally as hard. In fact, I will probably do laps just to see if I can confuse the onlooking primates.

And it occurred to me that that’s probably a good motto for life: Arrive an hour earlier, pack a convenient stick of deodorant, and see if you can confuse the onlooking primates.

The strange business of talking

I am a sucker for descriptions of “ordinary” things that make them seem extraordinarily bizarre, especially when done as eloquently as this one from Bill Bryson in The Mother Tongue:

Paradoxically, we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety—and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of minor atmospheric disturbances.

These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.

If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.

And yet we achieve the process effortlessly. We absorb and interpret spoken sounds more or less instantaneously. If I say to you, “Which do you like better, peas or carrots?” it will take you on average less than a fifth of a second—the length of an eye blink—to interpret the question, consider the relative merits of the two vegetables, and formulate a reply. We repeat this process hundreds of times a day, generally with such speed that often we have our answer ready before the person has even finished the question.

And, we’re made out of meat.

If you ever need a reminder of the bizarreness around you / in you, I advise taking a good hard look at that pinkish organ inhabiting your mouth.

The female perspective: A male’s perspective

Being an adult is hot, I learned from this Glamour article (thanks, Lydia).

At this point you might want to smack me and say: “Are you seriously just another grown woman talking about how she wants a man who isn’t afraid of commitment?” Let me explain! I’m not talking about commitment to romantic relationships. I’m talking about commitment to things—houses, jobs, neighborhoods. Paying a mortgage. When men hear women want a commitment, they think it means commitment to a romantic relationship, but that’s not it. It’s a commitment to not floating around anymore. I want a guy who is entrenched in his own life. Entrenched is awesome.

Ladies: I can give you Entrenched.

But before I get to that, a little more female perspective:

Boys are adorable. Boys trail off their sentences in an appealing way. Boys get haircuts from their roommate, who “totally knows how to cut hair.” Boys can pack up their whole life and move to Brooklyn for a gig if they need to. Boys have “gigs.” Boys are broke. And when they do have money, they spend it on a trip to Colorado to see a music festival.

Until I was 30, I dated only boys. I’ll tell you why: Men scared the sh*t out of me. Men know what they want. Men own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn’t on the floor. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving you some long preamble about how they’re thinking of kissing you. Men wear clothes that have never been worn by anyone else before.

The point: Men know what they want, and that is scary.

Weird. So if I’m interpreting this correctly, females nearish my age might want a “man,” at least as a second-order desire, but at the same time might be intimidated by “men,” maybe because they are still girlish themselves. So, paradoxically, they’re not sure whether they want someone who knows what he wants.

As a side note, I agree: totally freaky. One of the great mysteries of the universe to me is people who know what they want.

I guess by that definition I’m not a man. But I don’t seem to fit the boy profile either. I am trying to figure out where I fall on the boy/man continuum.

Evidence: I am up to three racquetball partners who have said to me, “Do you have kids yet? Oh, you’re not even married yet?!” I then patiently explain how I don’t even have a ladyfriend at the moment. And then I take them back inside the racquetball court and proceed to whoop their ass, unbitterly.

I guess the fact that I am being asked these questions is a sign that I am getting old and adult-y. Which is weird, because I don’t feel old or adult-y. In some ways I still feel fresh out of the high school womb. I hardly feel adult-y enough to buy beer.

I show the outward signs of adult responsibility. I am employed; I floss; I listen to public radio; I own property; I have investments and retirement plans; I have a dependent (well, a dog); I remember to buy toothpaste.

On the other hand, I still laugh pretty heartily at poop jokes.

More evidence: As I write this, it is 1:30 AM and I am sitting in my jammies listening to Katy Perry.

I have a theory that there is some experimental stage in ordinary lives – one where people try recreational drugs or binge on alcohol or make out with strangers – the consequences of which trigger some response that says, “OK: time to grow up.”

I think I skipped that stage.

I wonder if I might need to artificially induce an experimental stage in order to blossom into a capital-M Man. But it kind of feels too late for that. What am I going to do, show up at a college party and say, “hey guys, wanna talk Roth IRAs?”

I guess the point is that there is a big difference between living like an adult and feeling like an adult, where feeling like an adult is defined as knowing what you want and laughing less heartily at poop jokes.

Which leads me to the conclusion that I am probably the ideal mate for a 20-something female: I can offer entrenchment in abundance, I can give you really cute babies, and, best of all, none of this knowing-what-I-want B.S.

Party Rock

If the blogosphere is a small, incestuous village, then I consider Mark Larson and Colin Marshall to be my next door neighbors.

They probably resent that statement, but too bad, this is my blog and I get to say what I want on it.

Our styles are quite different, but there seem to be some pretty serious underlying similarities. Something like this:

A tendency to get existential on your ass.
A little bit of wisecracking.
Some criticism of culture.
Some cultural ADD. An unwillingness to pick one thing – or one hundred things – to devote interest to.

But I think Colin and Mark might be more similar to one another than they are to me because the thing that seems to characterize them the most… I think it might be an insult to call someone an “aesthete,” so instead I am going to call them people who take their aesthetics seriously, but do so in a decidedly non-snobbish way. Mark posted this quote from Daniel Mendelsohn that I think summarizes it beautifully:

Strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even… Critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken.

I know some people who seem to have good taste in music or in clothing or in writing or some other specific domain, but the really impressive thing about Mark and Colin is that they seem to have good taste in everything. I trust their judgments on everything from foreign films to tweets. And I trust their judgments more than anyone.

They make me feel somewhat brutish, but that’s okay, because following their blogs as closely as I have for as long as I have, I feel that I have been able to view, to some extent, the universe through their eyes. I’ve gotten a peek at what it’s like to know beauty as if on a first-name basis.

On the other hand, I am still reading trashy Pop Psych books and listening to Spiral Staircase, exactly the type of stuff that someone who knows beauty on a first-name basis would not consume. Especially lately I’ve been on somewhat of a trash-consuming kick. Rather than listening to public radio like a good upper middle class whitie, I’ve been spending most of my radio listening time on a local station called G105 that seems to have a playlist consisting of various selections by Katy Perry. Every once in a while they’ll throw a curveball with Rihanna. And you know what? I’m enjoying it. More than I am comfortable admitting.

I think the reason why I felt compelled to write about this is because I feel the need to resolve – intellectually, at least – this conflicting tug I feel between this envy for Mark and Colin’s sensibilities and this pull I have to consume things that are, uh, less than “high culture.”

Here is where I invent a theory in order to rationalize my behavior: Maybe the reward I get from consuming G105-like material is that the humanity is pouring out of the opposite end. I’ll explain.

I think “high culture” can be fairly defined as stuff that we imagine was painstakingly and skillfully put together by some craftsman whose goal was to touch our nerve endings or say something profound about the human experience by injecting his stuff with many layers of depth or meaning.

On the other hand, the opposite kind of culture can probably be fairly defined as stuff that we imagine was put together by some business- or popularity-minded person by playing with combinations of sounds until he found one that made him say, “Ooo, hot beat.” This may be completely unfair, but I am going to name LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem as the perfect example.

This is going to sound terribly pretentious and bullshit-y, but the lack of intention that I perceive in G105-like stuff makes it in some ways even more beautiful. They are not being philosophers or artists. They are just being humans. They just want me to dance. And I appreciate that.


***

Somewhat related: There is one kind of “culture” that I absolutely cannot stand, and that is the kind that I perceive to be full of intention but failing to deliver on depth. I’m looking at you, American Family Radio. I’m tempted to say more, but the world already has plenty of Christian Rock bashers.

So instead let me bash Dave Barry. I picked up a book of his for the first time, and while it made me laugh heartily for the first few chapters, now I am struggling to finish it. I can feel the effort that went into crafting the sentences to maximize funniness. These chapters probably took a ridiculously long time to write, especially with how he always tries to wrap everything up at the end. But what bothers me is that despite all the effort that probably went into it, there is nothing behind the humor. He’s not saying anything.

This has actually been a very sad realization for me because I thought humor/mockery had some sort of inherently built-in lessons if you just pay enough attention to it. I believed that if you search for why something is funny you are likely to learn something about this absurd life we are living. Instead, reading Dave Barry has now de-elevated my perception of humor to just another thing that may or may not have any calories.

Shyness in Fleecedom

We humans, although socialish, are nonetheless suspicious of strangers. Like most creatures, we tend to view others first as competitors or threats, and only later after much processing of evidence as potential friends and bedmates and cuddlebuddies.

I think this explains 58% of the problems with online dating, but I don’t want to go there. We’ve heard enough of my blabbering about that.

One thing that interests me is why we expect to be comfortable with strangers, believing that it is somehow pathological if we are not.

It is very mammalian to be uncomfortable with or even downright hostile to strangers. The female tiger, for example, will savage an approaching male even when she’s in heat. It typically takes her days to dampen her aggression to a point that he can cuddle up without getting his innards ripped out.

OK, that’s just one example: Admittedly not the strongest case. But I challenge you to name a counterexample. And dogs don’t count because dogs are basically incompetent wolves who are perpetually stuck in puppyhood. (Lovably so.)

The thing is, if you don’t experience some form of performance anxiety, public speaking anxiety, stage fright, or general shyness or timidness, then you are probably one messed up cat.

Consider what happens when social caution is completely absent. There are people with a rare condition for whom this is just the case, and they are extremely friendly, trusting, loving, and loveable. But there is a flip side to that coin.

This is probably just me trying to justify or rationalize my own shyness. The truth is that if you live in Fleecedom then you really have no rational reason to be shy, especially when you pack huge forearm muscles like me. (People who know me in flesh, stop laughing.)

I don’t have any rational reason to be shy now, in 2011 Fleecedom, but that’s not how it works. The chemical and electrical processes that make up my mess of a body were not constructed in a 2011 suburban America environment.

(Side note: The science fiction book I would most like to read would be an imagined universe where creatures evolved out of a suburban whitie environment.)

I’m trying to understand how it makes sense that people or creatures exist who are un-shy. I can come up with only two possible explanations: (1) they evolved or adapted faster than me, or (2) they’re seriously effed up.

My inner oracle says it’s the latter.

Wal-Mart karma

Tonight I had a strange experience at Wal-Mart that will forever change the way I view the universe and buy groceries.

Most people shop at W-M to save pennies. I shop at W-M for karma. Although there is a non-trivial chance that I will end up being the most important figure in history, I want to signal to humanity that I am just an ordinary, jeans-wearing dude. An average fella just like them.

Well karma sometimes has a way of biting you in sensitive areas.

I pulled into the P lot a little before midnight, 90’s tunes blaring, and feeling souped up to go re-stock on Fig Newtons. As soon as I exited Le Civic I heard a voice calling, “Excuse me sir! Excuse me sir!”

It was a female. Whoa.

A female who wants to talk with me? At this hour? In this place? In this sweatshirt? Something’s clearly not right.

“Oh God. Oh God. This is so embarrassing,” she began.

She then proceeded to toss out lots of prefaces. “I’m not a bum. Here, you can have my phone number. I’ve worked at UNC for 10 years,” etc. etc. She was in full nurse garb.

She then launched into a story that I only caught pieces of. It had something to do with an 82 year old man in her car but I wasn’t clear on the details because her words kind of blended into one another.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said as she laid her hand softly on my shoulder.

I melted a little. I’m glad I’m here, too. What a great fucking parking lot.

“I just need $38.75.”

Pause.

We gazed into each others’ eyes excitedly knowing that the climax had just been reached.

Just as I felt my hand reaching toward my back pocket, I had second thoughts. I started to feel a little uncomfortable with the situation.

I ended up declining. I used the classic, “Sorry, I don’t have any cash” excuse.

She walked away in the direction of other shoppers saying loudly, “This is the most embarrassing moment of my life!”

I walked into W-M feeling something like satisfaction with myself. You didn’t fall for that one, kiddo. Nothing gets past you. Hot damn, you’re smart.

But as I was sorting through the lightly-salted peanuts I started to feel unsatisfied with my satisfaction. You’re satisfied about jilting a woman who has resorted to dressing as a nurse and approaching W-M shoppers to try to get $40? Well done, dickface.

After checking out, I started to feel a little nervous getting ready to re-enter the parking lot. Would she still be there? What would I do if she was?

She was still there, making her pitch to two women in fleece. I observed the situation carefully as I slowly loaded the goods into my car.

I started playing out scripts in my mind:

“Hi ma’am. I reconsidered. Here’s $20.”

No, I’m not that nice.

“I’m not going to give you $40. But I will give you a hug.”

Way too drippy and weird.

“I’m not going to give you $40, but if you want, I’ll give you a ride home.”

Nah, she’s not gonna go for that.

So I got in Le Civic and drove off.

Next time it’s going to be different. Next time I’m going to shop at Whole Foods.

Mmm, humanity

The fundamental experience of being human (alive?) is this: All of our decisions and all of our behaviors – our whole damn mess of a life – is the product of measuring personal emotional responses to imagined alternatives as though consulting a hidden oracle. Remarkably, this is true even for economists and philosophers.

Where to live, what to do, whom to marry; whether to release a fart under the covers, how to delicately reveal to a potential spouse that you enjoy certain music by Neil Diamond. These are just a few of the questions that plague humanity. No matter the scale of the question, we answer it in pretty much the same way, because we know only one way to make decisions. And it ain’t reason.

It seems that the fundamental question of humanity (life?), then, is something like this: What exactly is this hidden oracle we are consulting? How does it work? How well does it work? Why does it do what it does? WHAT THE EFF DOES IT WANT FROM ME?

There are a number of possible answers. Here are the likeliest to be correct:

1. The hidden oracle was carefully lodged into place by a divine creature. She/He/It has given me this little spark of wisdom to consult whenever I’m in a philosophical bind because She/He/It loves me and wants the best for me.

2. The hidden oracle, like the rest of the body, is a device for survival and reproduction that was built and refined through genetic chance and environmental necessity. The “oracle,” then, is just an emotional calculator that hints at what behaviors helped my hairy or scaley ancestors to survive or land vagina.

I’ll leave it to your hidden oracle to decide which seems more plausible (or comfortable).

The thing is, though, it really doesn’t matter which view you subscribe to because it is not going to change the origin, content, or consequences of your decisions.

Therefore, I have found nihilism.

Word invention

In a book called How Shakespeare Changed Everything, Stephen Marche argues that ole Billy is the single most important figure in history. You can listen to him defend his dubious argument here.

One area where Shakespeare had a fair amount of influence is in word creation. I learned from Bill Bryon’s book The Mother Tongue that, according to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one tenth had never been used before. Many of them are still in common use. Among the words Shakespeare gave us are these: barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, and 1,685 others. Here’s a longer list.

You can’t see me behind my keyboard, but I’m brimming with jealousy right now. I want to be the most important figure in history.

But I’m up for the challenge, and there’s still time. 2,500 weeks or so, to be precise. That means I just need to introduce new words into perpetuity at a pace of 1/week and then I will eventually unseat that chump as the most important goofy white person of all time.

Here are a few to get us started:

Sideboobed (v.) – shown private, alluring things that are not exactly what you want or expect.
Misepiphany (n.) – an epiphany where you goofed up; realize that, in fact, you are dumb.
Fleecedom (n.) – a place with too many white people wearing fleece.

Fellow bloggers: I expect to see these words littered all over the Internet in the coming days, otherwise I’ll never link to your ass again.

Economist on the loose

We economists pretty much keep to ourselves. If you see one of us wandering the halls it’s typically because we have to pee. Either that or to restock our veins with coffee or to print pages with lots of numbers on them. The only way to get us to socialize is through the subtle coercion of organized events wrought by the social committee.

So you know to be suspicious if you see an economist lingering. What does he want? I don’t have any cost data. Leave us be.

Well lately I’ve been doing a suspicious amount of lingering. I’m surprised no one has phoned the authorities. When I have to pee, instead of making a direct line to the little boy’s room as most good economists do, sometimes I’ll take a small tour around campus on the way to the restroom.

Just stretchin’ my legs, you know, gettin’ a little sun exposure. Peekin’ in windows or what not. Gettin’ souped up for the big tinkle.

That’s what I imagine I’ll tell the authorities if they ever come. And then I imagine they’ll ask me to expand on the peeking in windows part.

Well you see, authority figure, as an economist I am naturally curious about productivity. I want to know if the worker bees are really being good worker bees or if they are reading TMZ on company time. It’s the principal-agent problem, really. So I’m just, you know, taking a convenience sample and seeing how well economic theory holds. A little empirical testing is all.

Not knowing what the word “empirical” means, they’ll reluctantly let me go on the basis of insufficient evidence, and then I’ll safely return to my desk, where I’ll send anonymous emails saying the following:

Dear “worker” who has a penchant for celebrity gossip,

I may or may not have photographic evidence of the websites you have been visiting on company time, and I may or may not share that photographic evidence with the patrons of the cafeteria if the cash sum of $5 USD is not put in an envelope and left under the picnic table by 11:00am tomorrow.

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

--Your colleague

P.S. – Bieber? Really?

Economists gonna economize.

Writers and Females

In Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Foster Wallace says in three sentences everything I was trying to say in the last post:

I think that there is, in writing, a certain blend of absolute naked sincerity and manipulation, and a certain way of trying always to gauge what the particular effect of something is gonna be. That’s a very precious asset that really needs to be turned off sometimes. And one of the reasons why I think I’ve had such a hard time with females is that I think I’m sort of in that head that makes it where I can be both spontaneous and very very very very self-conscious.

Later he said something in passing that is probably the best characterization of a writer I’ve heard:

Writers have a queer blend of shyness and exhibitionism.

He suspects, though, that writers’ queer traits make them good partners, depending on your perspective:

My guess as a private citizen is that writers probably make really fun, skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly considerate partners for other people. But that the experience for them is often rather lonely.

Why fuss with females when it’s so much easier having dogs?

It’s just much easier having dogs. You don’t get laid, but you also don’t get the feeling you’re hurting their feelings all the time.

Here’s why:

I really have wished I was married the last couple of weeks, because it’d be nice to have somebody to um—you know, because nobody quite gets it. Your friends who aren’t in the writing biz are just all awed by your picture in Time, and your agent and editor are good people, but they also have their own agendas. And there’s something about, there would be something different about having somebody who kinda shared your life and, uh, that you could allow yourself just to be happy and confused with.

It was fascinating to hear him describe his crush on Alanis Morissette, whom he had posters of inside his Bloomington house:

She’s pretty, but she’s pretty in a sloppy, very human way. A lot of women in magazines are pretty in a way that isn’t erotic because they don’t look like anybody you know. You can’t imagine them putting a quarter in a parking meter or eating a bologna sandwich. And her—even though I’m smart enough to know part of that image is crafted—there’s a kind of sexiness in spite of it, that’s very, I don’t know. I just find her absolutely riveting.

If by some paradox, this whole fuss [over his book Infinite Jest] could get me some kind of even just like a five-minute cup of tea with her, that would be reward enough.

I Googled to try to find out if he ever got to meet her. No hits, so I’m guessing not.

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I finished the book tonight and I was surprised to find that after I rated it in my nerdy spreadsheet it became the top-rated book in the whole damn list. (Not the same as saying it’s my favorite; it’s not.) I’ve had the book collecting dust in my living room for months because I was afraid it was going to be some gooey look-at-how-awesome-DFW-was wincefest. One night in boredom I decided to at least give it a chance, and was even more skeptical when I realized the book is actually just a 300+ page transcript from a five-day promotional road trip.

But then, more than any book I can remember, I had a really hard time putting it down. Most books I read for 10-20 pages to ease me into my slumber, but this was the rare type of book that kept me wide awake.

The point of this post is that Justin Wehr is smart and funny

People talk up “awareness” and “curiosity” – which I think are similar enough concepts that I will lump them into one category and call it “awariosity” – like it is some sort of universal antidote to all our ills. (“And no side effects!”) I strongly disagree.

Of all the many desirable traits that make me a cherished cult figure in the blogosphere, it is perhaps my blistering awariosity that people seem to admire the most. It’s a trait handed down by the gods to deserving writerly folk like myself. But I want to express my down-to-earth humility by telling you that I am not special, really. You can have awariosity, too. All you need to do is blow some wind up their heavenly skirts and they will inject some of that good stuff straight into your buttocks.

But before you do that, I should warn you: Awariosity is not all it’s cracked up to be.

It can be distracting to the point of debilitating. When I write these posts, I have awariosity seething inside my skull. I’m not just thinking about the topic of this post but also about why I choose to write about it and what the eff I’m doing with my mess of a life. I am awarious that, at some level, the point of this post and all other posts is that Justin Wehr is smart and funny. In other words, the point is: Ladies, I’ll give you clever babies!

And I am awarious how absurd that is. To advertise my cleverness via Blogspot.com is, to put it mildly… inefficient. It’d be like a peacock flashing his tailfeathers from the balcony at JC Penny’s. (Ooo, clever analogy.)

This makes blogging challenging because, on the one hand, I have this absurd drive to flash my tailfeathers, and, on the other hand, I wince whenever I catch myself doing it, which is pretty much all the time.

And it gets worse. Even if I moved my displays to a more appropriate medium – say the balcony of Nordstrom – I still have, uh, issues. Issues stemming from awariosity.

I am awarious, for example, that a not insignificant portion of my attraction to a lady can be explained by my perception that she is attracted to me. In other words, I like she who might like me. I’ve written about this before. I don’t think this kind of conditional attraction is unusual, but it still makes me feel grimy. And I’ve learned that potential mates aren’t too keen on hearing it, either. It’s like telling them, “You’re okay, but I really just want to be liked.”

Studying economics can do similarly disastrous things to your romantic success. I think the main thing that studying economics does to your thinking is that it leads you to conceptualize every behavior and every decision, from as grand as “whom should I sleep with for the next 30 years?” to as mundane as “should I tell her that she smells a little funny?,” as one of effort and reward, costs and benefits, weighing expected future and present NET gains against time values in some sort of perverted internal calculus.

It can be a downright bleak way of viewing the universe. An economist might think that I am with my partner and she is with me not because of any silly, naïve notion like “love,” but because, right now, the benefits outweigh the costs relative to our next best alternative. What looks at the surface like selfless sacrifice and loyalty to another is really just two people engaged in what closely resembles a retail transaction.

You can imagine what that does to one’s libido.

Maybe the best evidence I can give for why you shouldn’t be eager to amp up “the richness of your mental life” (or whatever) is a little anecdote of what happened when I got rejected by a girl. Because this post is already longish, I am putting it below the fold, in the form of a letter to Carolyn Hax.

Terms that have different meaning for scientists and commonfolk

(Via an article called Communicating the science of climate change via Mountain Beltway via Measure of Doubt)

Economics so badly needs a table like this.

Metaphorical side boob

One of the 1,042 feeds I subscribe to in Google Reader is Digg, which inundates me with ~60 items per day, almost none of which I ever end up reading. I subscribe purely for the pleasure and insight that comes from learning what the common folk are currently “digging.”

I came across one the other day that might be the Digg-iest of Digg articles ever written. I really believe that if you analyzed the entire history of front-page Digg articles and statistically computed The Most Typical Front-Page Digg Article Ever, this would be it:

“The 100 Hottest Sideboob Photos of All Time (Gallery)”

It has all the elements. It perfectly fits the formula of number + modifier + alluring thingy + time period + what it is (in parens). I could go on for awhile about each element, but the point of this post is not how to write winning Digg titles. The point is that sideboob might be the best metaphor ever.

The challenge I am up against is communicating a metaphor while at the same time not ruining it by over-explaining it, by turning it into an analogy. Nobody likes analogies.

Let me try it this way:

What is it that makes sideboob so alluring? Probably it’s something to do with the fact that you don’t get to see the full boob, and in particular you don’t get to see the nipple, but you do get to see a part that still feels private or unique or special. You are teased a little.

Here is where I make a broad, ballsy statement that probably isn’t completely true: Just about everything that we find alluring or seductive or attractive is that way. The music, movies, books, and people that we find most attractive are the ones that have shown us a thick dose of metaphorical sideboob.

I don’t want to get deep down in the shit of Theory of Aesthetics, but we might need to at least get our toes muddy for me to make my point.

Music: The songs that pull hardest at my heartstrings are the ones where the pace or rhythm does some twisted things to my expectations such that I never quite get rewarded with exactly what I want or expect. As soon as I get exactly what I want or expect, the song has died to me. It has become dull.

Movies: Aren’t the best ones just one giant tease? Isn’t that what plot is? Tease after tease after tease.

Books: Same.

People: The women I seem to find most alluring are, like with music, the ones who keep subtly violating my wants and expectations.

It seems a general rule of aesthetics, then, that the most attractive things show a lot of sideboob but little to no nipple.

This is a little different from common advice like “be mysterious” or “play hard to get.” If you focus on being mysterious you can easily end up looking creepy or weird. If you focus on playing hard to get you can easily end up looking disinterested or difficult. I think what both pieces of advice are going for but fail to properly convey is “show more sideboob.” Show more vulnerabilities or privateness but refrain from giving them exactly what they want or expect.

And since I know a lot of women get their fashion advice from this blog, I’ll add this: Depending on what you’re going for, it’d probably be wise to keep your boobs in your blouse. One of the most common errors women make in dressing themselves is thinking that all guys always want to see as much skin as you can practically get away with showing. But dress that way and you risk looking like a billboard for easy sex.

If you want to know how to dress alluringly, I suggest thinking metaphorical sideboob rather than literal sideboob. It’s not just a matter of flashing some breast tissue; it’s a matter of hinting at what makes you unique or special or vulnerable while not making it clear exactly what that is.

But if you can pull that off while still flashing some breast tissue, by all means, please do.

On a slightly related note, I notice one major fault/gap with this theory. If what people find most attractive is metaphorical sideboob, then how do we explain Internet pornography, which is, to my eye, more than a little heavy on metaphorical nipple?

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It’s funny how female sideboob (the literal kind) is pretty much universally alluring to guys but the male equivalent of sideboob is so totally NOT attractive to women. As Brian Posehn has pointed out (NSFW, obviously), guys aren’t gonna win ladies’ hearts by walking around showing a little “neck.”